A monitoring vehicle has a side view mirror for each side thereof and a rear-view mirror at the front center of its cabin for a good field of view of the side and the rear needed for change of lanes by a driver.
Although the side view mirror is used for seeing each side and the rear thereof, it has a blind spot where the driver cannot see a monitored vehicle or any other objects that are very close thereto.
This has been a problem because there can be an accident with the monitored vehicle in the blind spot if the driver changes lanes without seeing the monitored vehicle.
To prevent such a problem, the driver sometimes put a convex mirror onto a corner of the side view mirror, which enables the driver to see the blind spot.
However, even when the convex mirror is added onto the side view mirror, the driver must see the blind spot with his/her own eyes to change lanes which puts further strain to the driver, and there may exist the blind spot that still cannot be seen through the convex mirror even if the driver alters his/her head position.
To prevent this, a conventional blind-spot warning system was suggested that aims to prevent accidents from happening when the driver changes lanes without noticing the monitored vehicle in the blind spot, by providing the driver with information on a detection of the monitored vehicle, that is located in the blind spot or approaching the blind spot, through a sensor placed at the rear of the monitoring vehicle.
Especially, the conventional blind-spot warning system using a vision sensor may detect monitored vehicles included in video information and determine whether the monitored vehicles are on the blind spots by using information on the detected monitored vehicles.
Recently, a new blind-spot warning system in which position information of vehicles is shared by V2V communication has been proposed.
However, in the conventional blind-spot warning system, there is a problem that an accurate blind-spot warning cannot be provided when the vehicles are between tall buildings where position accuracy deteriorates, or in driving conditions such as cloudy weather, tunnel, etc., while the position information of the vehicles using GPS is shared by the V2V communication.
Further, in the conventional blind-spot warning system, there is a problem in that the accurate blind-spot warning cannot be provided when the lens of the rear camera installed at the rear of the vehicle is contaminated with water-drops or the like.
In addition, in the conventional blind-spot warning system, there is a problem that the blind-spot warning cannot be provided because object detection performance based on an image of the rear camera is low during nighttime driving in low illumination.